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Betrayals: Oneby Steve Bowers |
Zero minus 2 days
Three nights before the ascension they had held a party.
Auguste could not remember it too much; he had been saying his goodbyes to his robot, and they had both been drunk. Now he was sober, thanks to the instant cure he had taken in lieu of breakfast; but something else had been going on. Something between Lesöva and the multibodied freak. And what was worse, that self same freak was coming with them, to the centre of the world, far above their heads.
But first they all had to go through the wall of the world, and into the waiting shuttlecraft. Eighty or more souls were soon on board the Geographer Cone, all hopeful Acolytes for Ascension, including Auguste Gienah, Lesöva Zubenelshamali, and the multiple bodied
SDiavid Slarian.
Gus Gienah was feeling that he had been human long enough, and he suspected Lesöva thought that he had been too. He was six hundred and seventy three standard years old. She was his current long-term dyad partner, and seated herself beside him as they secured themselves for take-off.
"Well, you knew very well Slarian was going to the Lamp, too. All that sort of thing won't be important after It happens, you know," she said, not too loudly, but with some emotion.
Outside the wall of the world there was a long, long drop.
Down there were the rest of the stars of the galaxy, and all anybody had to do was let go, and sooner or later they would get there. Today, however, the small shuttlecraft Geographer Cone was going upwards to the overhead Lamp, and the one hundred-fifty passengers on board, in a manner of speaking, were set on ascending even higher. Despite the fact that the Lamp was as high as they could get in the physical world (as it was constructed), they were each hoping to pass into an elevated realm of mentality, together and separately.
Some eagerly awaited it, some were apprehensive and some sought refuge from lives that never seemed to bring fulfilment.
The shuttlecraft moved up the magnetic track, set into the side of the atmosphere wall, ready to be flung towards the central Lamp of the huge two thousand kilometre diameter habitat known as Rendell Ring. This habitat rotated to provide artificial gravity, and to stop the atmosphere from escaping over the top of the wall. From further away, it could be seen to be one of two hundred and thirteen similar, but by no means identical Rings, joined by a tiny, almost invisible string; the Cable Railway. The whole structure was collectively known as the Arkab Prior B Necklace in the Sagittarius sector; further out could be seen the beginnings of a new necklace, tiny sparks of light at this distance.
SDiavid Slarian; all ten of him, was seated in different seats all round the comfortable cabin. Slarian was a multi, a composite individual made up of ten bodies, some coloured pink, some blue, but who all shared a single consciousness. The idea was that they would be ten times as intelligent as a single human being. Gus thought they were easily ten times as stupid as well.
"Which one was it? They all look the same to me," said Gus.
Beneath his frosted transparent jacket his variable skin tattoos were displaying lines of marching cartoon savages, armed with machetes.
"Well, they are all the same-“ she said, shortly. ”Oh, by Binah, I don't know, one of the blue ones.
I thought we agreed it doesn't count with robots."
Lesöva's skin tattoos currently depicted stylised thorns and flowers slowly moving in the wind. To Gus it looked like the petals were constantly becoming detached and blown away, but it was hard to tell beneath her translucent shirt. Sometimes the pictograms they both wore could convey subtle clues to the state of mind they were in, as the tattoos were only under semi-conscious control.
He willed his own tattoos to show a neutral set of non-sentient advertisements and pop-ups.
<'For soma or aesthesia-
Best try Tergrer!
GUARANTEED AUTHENTIC
Metaqualia'>
This advertising brought in a small amount of revenue for Auguste, and helped him top up the civilised living allowance every full citizen of the Mutual Progress Alliance received. In an advanced society like the Alliance, with artificial intelligences regulating the economy and throughput of energy, it was difficult to find high-stress, cutting edge employment for most citizens. To find that they would need to emigrate to the edge of Explored Space, and become colonist pioneers, with all the real risks that entailed. Gus had taken many calculated risks in his time in the comfortable Alliance civilisation, but he had rarely been in danger of a final and irrevocable death.
"Anyway, I seem to remember you going on about when you slept with a multi yourself, and how good it was,” Lesöva continued.
Gus swung his head round, to see if any of Slarian was looking at them. Sure enough, the furthest one, sitting at the back, swiftly looked away, but Gus was sure there was another one watching now.
Damn- he's got twenty eyes, and my brushrobot is on vacation, he thought.
"That was nearly thirty tenyears ago, and besides that was when I was a woman."
If he had had his trusty brushrobot with him, Gus could have asked the bot to monitor all the damn multis at once. Not that it would do him any good - Slarian was just having a bit of fun, while Lesöva seemed to think little of it. Only Gus was taking it seriously.
The shuttle left the curved maglev track up the wall of the world and shot into a transfer orbit towards the central Lamp. Suddenly they were in freefall.
"It's seven tenyears since I have been with anybody else, you know," he said, as he unsealed his seat restraints and gently floated into the air.
"Not counting virches and erobots, of course." She remained seated, still sealed tight. "It is not very long since you disappeared off into a virtual for twenty subjective years, I waited three days for you to come out."
A very common form of entertainment for the people of the Civilised Galaxy was virtual worlds, also used for esoteric research. This was a fully convincing evocation of an imaginary environment, which could run much faster than real life.
"Ah. I see. That was what this was all about- you couldn't stand me having fun.” Gus paused for a long time, but reaching no particular conclusions. “ Well, let me tell you, being in a virtual alien body for twenty years (subjective or not) isn't the same as going off with other people."
A sudden gleam of sunlight came through the virtual window strip that girdled the passenger lounge, as Arkab Prior B, the local sun, peeped over the curve of the vast habitat ring. It illuminated the lounge and it's occupants:
apart from the ten oversexed multis, the shuttle carried half a dozen other tattooed Scrabo folk like Lesöva and Auguste, and thirty or so dwarfish Methuselahs, and in adapted seats three Goliath people and a moose-splice. Most of the people Gus could see were at least partly human, although none seemed to be unmodified.
A typical crossection of subsingularity humanity.
With luck, most of them would put that behind them before they left the Lamp. Every passenger wore the silver cap of the Prepared For Ascension acolyte.
"I know you mated with those To'ul whelk-things while you were in there," said Lesöva.
Gus spluttered, "It's not like with humans, you know, you have to bite your way through the skin-"
"Spare me-" she said, and turned to smile warmly at the closest Slarian clone, who smoothly glided in the microgravity towards them.
Gus's heart sank.
The pink dividual grinned at Lesöva, then at Gus.
"Hey! How's ya doin, hu!" Slarian drawled. "You the guy who was crying over your robot last night, eh?" Another dividual was talking simultaneously to Lesöva now, a blue one.
Gus was trying to watch them and talk to the pink instance at the same time; he was getting giddy. "Yes, I suppose it was; we have been associates for about five hundred years."
"Heh, and the little bastard don't want to ascend with you, won't go into the unknown with his symbiote, eh?" said pink Slarian. The blue one and Lesöva had their heads together, laughing, now.
Gus gritted his teeth. "Well, Max is a free agent; he says he will think about it, depending how well it suits me. How well it suits me and Lesöva."
"Nice woman, that. She's a free agent too, of course, eh, hu, a free radical, free as a bird, eh, hu, know what I mean, eh." These multis were notorious for repeating things in a most irksome manner.
"So I take it she has been getting friendly with one of your robot - er - instances, is that right, Slarian?" Gus's tattoos were tiny black and red daggers; he had always had trouble concealing his
feelings, and now he wasn't trying. "We kinda decided long ago that robots don't count – well, not as much anyway."
"Heh, y'see, a lot of women make that mistake; my robots are just as much a part of me as my human bodies, just as connected, y'see;" and as Slarian said that he tapped the blue instance on the shoulder, and they swapped places; now Gus was talking to the blue dividual, and Lesöva was talking to the pink human one.
" - all my bodies have one mind," said the blue robot in exactly the same voice. "We only have one consciousness, so you can't get friendly with one of us without all the others knowing all about it,
eh, tattoo man." The pink and blue copies swung round again, a graceful manoeuvre in zero gee; now the pink one said "Pity you weren't as close to your little robot chum; he might not have
skedaddled so quick when you decided to ascend."
"You never know," said Gus, abruptly kicked away towards his seat and secured himself again, red and black all over. Eventually Lesöva sat down next to him, but he did not acknowledge her.
-----------
There were several stocky Penglaiese hi-gravity humans in the ascension party; most were deeply immersed in virtual entertainment via their Direct Neural Interface implants, but one was acting as a
lookout, keeping an eye on the real world and the other passengers, and monitoring all the communications channels for news. Like a watch bird in a flock of geese, she was ready to sound the alarm if anything developed.
Right then she spoke aloud in a gravely voice, "-Tsien preserve us, look at e-Channel 675!"
Most of the passengers, hearing the alarm call of the Penglaiese watchperson, tuned into that channel and stared into space as the news displayed in their inner vision. Slarian continued mostly as before, needing only one of his instances to monitor the e-news.
Gus found e-Channel 657, but it was a programme about potted semi-sentient plants. Finally he found the right one.
~******Today an unexpected attack on the Keterist Ascension Crusade Headquarters at Rendell Habitat Luminaire Centre was foiled by the Mutual Progress seraphim in conjunction with Prior A Negentropist Bailiffs. Activated cryptonaughts were accompanied by chemocracker weapons, in a simultaneous attack that left seven transingularity beings subverted, and two inactive, presumed dead. The cryptonaught attackers have self-erased without trace, and the three nearbaseline
humans infected with the chemocracker weapons are believed to be beyond memory scan.
******A spokesbeing said that the presumed target of the attack, the blessed Fluke Chwrrii Nashira, was unharmed, while the subverted Crusaders have been neutralised and a full recovery is anticipated. Meanwhile the mass ascension planned for later this ten-day would go ahead. ~~~
The passenger cabin erupted into chaos, with most of the dwarfs grouping together in a globular cluster of short bodies, dozens of legs pointing outwards. Some skinny New Martian types were simply staring at each other, obviously communicating via the local net, while the illustrated Scrabos were shouting and texting on their bodies at the same time. Gus found himself dumbly allowing the text of the news item to scroll in a spiral around his body, while Lesöva grabbed his arm, seeming to forget their recent differences.
"WELL, WE -" SDiavid Slarian said loudly, with all of his ten mouths at once. He grinned at everyone broadly. "Sorry, everybody, we'll start again," he said (now using just two). "That's made our mind up. We're not going anywhere near the Keterists, not if they have been subverted. We would all end up as some kind of Cyberian joke, barking like seals or something."
"Corrupt my Backup! He's talking out of his ten arses," said Gus to Lesöva. "The Cyberians never kill any one- and they don't have any quarrel with the Crusaders, it's just Negentropists they hate."
"The Cyberians- no, you are right, it can't be them, it will be the Ordinaries or the Dispatchers again," Lesöva said.
For thousands of years the same excruciating guessing game had been going on after every act of terrorism- was it this or that faction, or is it some new pretender or even secret agents of the state?
" You'd think- oh, I don't know--"
"Yes, Lesöva, it's all right, don't worry, this sort of thing happens all the time. The Keterists can handle it. Child's play."
In seventy years together they had not had any children. Apart from the fact that they were drifting apart, in the same way that two bits of wood on separate oceans were drifting apart, this was
another motive for joining the mass ascension.
All the Slarian dividuals removed their silver skullcaps in one movement.
"Soon as I get to the lamp, I'm going to the Luminaire Hotel Bar and getting completely unnecessary. Who's coming with me?" said three of him in unison.
Half the Scrabo contingent and all the New Martians yelled their agreement, but the shortest and stoutest of the dwarfs elbowed his way forward and said in a deep voice- " We are not fainthearted- By Sesha, we mean to see this through! Towards Ascension!"
"What are you going to do, Gus?" whispered Lesöva.
"Do you mean you care?"
"I'd like to know. Forget all that stuff at the party; I want to do the ascension thing now. Are you coming with me or not?"
Gus's tattoos turned pale blue. He looked old.
"All my life, what I can remember of it anyway, I've been plagued by these gods and demons and powers, there's always some little godling meddling with my world and turning it crazy. Now I've got a chance to join them and get some meddling done myself. Entropy take me, but the gods and subversives are ganging up on me again to stop it happening."
"That's plebhu thinking, plebeian human, you know that. We have had months of preparation for this, and it's all falling apart like an melting comet."
"If any one of these go through with it-" he indicated the dwarfs and goliaths, and the thick set penglaiese filling the cabin at all angles in the microgravity, "just one, so am I. Whatever happens."
Lesöva gripped his shoulder.
"I am sure I am too. Everything to gain, and nothing particular to lose. I mean, look at that idiot of a multi. It would be nice to get away from that."
The ten pink and blue dividuals had already started drinking and partying hard.
